Michael J. Thompson Stephen Eric Bronner Wadood Hamad - Logos

Ali Hossaini
camera, human eyes augment the pinhole effect with a lens, bringing an
inverted image to bear on a light-sensitive surface, the retina. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1: The structure of the eye compared to the camera
(Wald, 1953)
Unlike those who followed, Kepler considered retinal inversion to be an
important problem. But he despaired of solving it and left its resolution to
later generations. 2 Progress came slowly. Little was known about the nervous
system until the nineteenth century, and only recently have scientists learned
how to inspect thought in real time. Now we know how the brain
apprehends the retinal image. But many questions still elude us. What effect
does media have on perception? Has sharing images—sharing perceptions—
affected individuality? Optical technologies permeate daily life, and, by
bridging vast distances, they have changed the nature of vision. The personal
has become institutional, mediated by cameras and computers, and we
inhabit virtual bodies created by photography, the telephone and television.
So our primary question might address how technology affects biology. Is
technology a form of evolution? Has social evolution superseded biological
evolution? Will governments and corporations completely subsume the
individual, limiting choice to matters of consumption? In confronting these
questions, optics is relevant to some of the most pressing issues in cultural
theory and, for that matter, human existence.
Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003